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Customs, Tariffs and Cross-Border Trade

IEEPA Tariff Refunds for Amazon Sellers: Who Actually Gets the Money

The Supreme Court voided the tariffs. Customs is refunding roughly $166 billion. But the refund goes to the importer of record — and most marketplace sellers are not the importer of record.

By Kenneth G. Eade, Esq., Founding Attorney, AMZ Sellers Attorney®  |  Published August 23, 2026  |  Approximately 12 minute read

What the Supreme Court actually decided

In February 2026, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, decided together with Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, the Supreme Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. The ruling invalidated the IEEPA-based duties that had been collected on imports beginning in early 2025 — the reciprocal tariffs, the fentanyl-related surcharges applied to goods of Canadian, Mexican and Chinese origin, and the various country-specific actions that followed. Within days the administration terminated the underlying orders and Customs stopped collecting IEEPA duties on entries made on or after February 24, 2026.

The scale is the part that matters to sellers. By the government's own accounting to the Court of International Trade, roughly 330,000 importers paid or deposited an estimated $166 billion in IEEPA duties across more than 53 million entries. That is not an abstraction. It is a very large number of $300 and $900 and $4,000 charges sitting inside the landed cost of ordinary FBA inventory.

What the decision did not touch is equally important. Section 232 duties on steel, aluminum and other covered categories, Section 301 duties on goods of Chinese origin, and antidumping and countervailing duties all rest on separate statutory authority. They remain in force and they are not refundable through this process. Any credible refund analysis begins by separating IEEPA duties from everything else on the entry.

How Customs is paying the money back

Refunds are not automatic. Customs built a new module inside the ACE Secure Data Portal called CAPE, for Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries. A claimant uploads a CSV file listing entry numbers — up to 9,999 per declaration, with multiple declarations permitted — and Customs validates the file, confirms the submitter's authority, recalculates duties, and consolidates approved refunds into a single electronic payment with statutory interest. Ordinary post summary corrections cannot be used for this purpose. CAPE is the channel.

The rollout has been phased, and the phases are not cosmetic. They determine whether recovery is administrative or judicial.

The problem nobody is writing about: you are probably not the importer of record

Every guide published on this subject so far has been written by a customs broker, a freight forwarder, or an accounting firm, and every one of them is addressed to the importer of record. That is a reasonable audience for those authors. It is the wrong audience for an Amazon seller.

Customs pays the importer of record named on the entry, or a party that importer has designated on CBP Form 4811. Consider how a typical FBA supply chain is actually structured:

• A Chinese manufacturer quotes delivered duty paid pricing. The manufacturer, its affiliate, or a nominated agent clears the goods. The seller sees one number on a proforma invoice and never touches a 7501.
• A freight forwarder or consolidator offers an all-in door-to-Amazon rate and clears in its own name under its own bond, invoicing the seller for duties as a pass-through line item.
• A 3PL or prep center handles inbound clearance for a group of clients and allocates duty charges across accounts.
• The seller imports in its own name, with its own bond and its own ACE account. This is the minority case among small and mid-sized sellers.

In the first three scenarios, the refund is legally the importer of record's to collect. The seller paid the duty economically but has no standing with Customs on that entry. And because approved refunds carry statutory interest running from the original entry date, the amount now sitting with that third party exceeds what the seller originally paid.

What a seller can actually do about it

Where a third party holds the refund, this stops being a customs question and becomes a commercial dispute. The theories available depend heavily on the paper, but the recurring ones are these.

Breach of contract and the duty line item

Where the seller was invoiced a specific duty or tariff surcharge as a pass-through charge, the agreement often characterizes that amount as a reimbursement of a cost incurred on the seller's behalf rather than as part of the service price. If the cost has now been refunded, the reimbursement obligation is arguably extinguished and retention of the refund is a breach. The strength of this argument tracks directly to how the charge was described on the invoice and in the rate agreement. Sellers whose forwarder simply quoted a single all-in number are in a materially weaker position than sellers whose invoices itemized duties separately.

Agency and the broker's obligations to its principal

A licensed customs broker acting for a client operates as an agent, with the accounting and disclosure duties that role carries. Where a broker or forwarder filed entries as agent, collected duty funds from the client, and has now recovered those funds from the government, the argument that the recovery belongs to the principal is a strong one. Where the forwarder acted as principal under its own bond and sold the seller a landed-cost product, the argument is harder and the answer turns on the contract.

Unjust enrichment and money had and received

Where no contract term squarely governs, restitution theories fill the gap. The elements are unusually clean here: the seller conferred a benefit, the third party retained it, and retention without payment is inequitable because the underlying obligation was void from the start. These claims are useful precisely because they do not depend on a well-drafted agreement, which most sellers do not have.

Read the forum and limitation clauses before you write the demand letter

This is where sellers lose otherwise good claims. Forwarder terms and conditions, NVOCC bills of lading, and 3PL service agreements routinely contain a foreign or inconvenient choice of forum, an arbitration clause, and — most dangerously — a contractual suit limitation far shorter than any statute of limitations, commonly nine months or one year from delivery. A seller who spends eighteen months politely asking a forwarder for an update may discover the claim was time-barred long before the refund was even processed. The paper controls, and it should be read before the first email is sent.

Where the supplier is the party holding the refund, add the practical problem that the counterparty is often offshore, judgment-proof in any realistic sense, and still supplying the seller's inventory. That combination usually points toward negotiated credit against future purchase orders rather than litigation, and the leverage for that negotiation is best created early, while the commercial relationship still has value to both sides.

If you were the importer of record, your problem is the calendar

Sellers who imported in their own name face a different and more urgent risk: entries liquidating out from under them.

Under 19 U.S.C. § 1514, a protest against a Customs decision must generally be filed within 180 days of liquidation. Unliquidated entries and recently liquidated entries fall inside the straightforward CAPE path. Finally liquidated entries do not. In July 2026 the Court of International Trade entered an order directing refunds on a plaintiff's finally liquidated entries and signaled that substantially similar relief would follow in the several thousand cases pending before it. Importers who never filed their own action have no equivalent confirmed administrative route for that category, and the government has appealed the scope of that relief to the Federal Circuit.

Reduced to its practical terms: entries are quietly liquidating every week, and each one that liquidates and ages past the protest window moves from the easy category to the category that may require a lawsuit — or may not be recoverable at all, depending on how the appeal resolves. Treating this as an open-ended administrative process is the single most expensive mistake available.

The second wave: what you told your customers

Many sellers responded to the tariffs by raising prices, and some did so transparently, itemizing a tariff surcharge at checkout or on wholesale invoices. Those sellers now sit on both sides of the transaction. They may be creditors of their forwarder or supplier, and they may be defendants to downstream purchasers arguing that a surcharge collected to fund a duty that has now been refunded should be returned. Claims of exactly this shape have already been filed against importers, and there is no reason to expect marketplace sellers to be exempt.

The exposure is largest where the surcharge was expressly labeled as a tariff recovery rather than folded into the price. Sellers in that position should be preserving records now showing what was collected, what was remitted, and to whom, before characterizing any recovered refund in their books.

One warning about the filing itself

A CAPE declaration is a representation to the federal government. Where the underlying entries contain valuation problems, misdescribed goods, incorrect country-of-origin declarations, or transshipment through an intermediary at a reduced declared value, filing a refund claim on those entries invites Customs to examine them closely. Penalties under 19 U.S.C. § 1592 are available for fraud, gross negligence and negligence in connection with entry, and false statements to a federal agency carry independent criminal exposure.

A refund claim is a bad reason to volunteer a customs file that will not withstand review. Where the entries are clean, file promptly. Where they are not, the analysis should happen before anything is submitted, and it should happen under privilege.

What to do this week

1. Pull your entry documents. Request CBP Form 7501 for every inbound shipment from February 2025 through February 2026 from whoever cleared them. A forwarder that resists producing entry summaries for shipments it handled on your behalf has told you something useful.
2. Read block 1 on each one. Sort your entries into two piles: those where you are the importer of record, and those where you are not. The two piles get completely different treatment.
3. Isolate the IEEPA duties. Look for Chapter 99 classifications in the 9903.01 and 9903.02 ranges. Do not build a claim that sweeps in Section 301 or Section 232 amounts.
4. Calendar liquidation on every entry you own. Then work backward from the 180-day protest window. Do this before anything else if you imported in your own name.
5. Locate the contract governing your forwarder or supplier relationship, including the terms on the back of the bill of lading and anything incorporated by reference on a website. Find the limitation period and the forum clause before you send a demand.
6. Preserve your customer-facing pricing records if you ever itemized a tariff surcharge.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who receives the IEEPA tariff refund if my supplier was the importer of record?

Customs issues the refund to the importer of record listed on the customs entry, or to a party that importer designated on CBP Form 4811. If a supplier shipping on delivered duty paid terms, a freight forwarder, a consolidator, or a 3PL was named, the refund and its statutory interest go to that party. The seller who bore the duty as a line item on an invoice has no direct claim against Customs for that entry. Recovery becomes a contract matter against the party holding the money.

Can an Amazon seller file a CAPE claim directly?

Only if the seller was the importer of record on the entry, or is a licensed customs broker properly authorized by that importer of record. A CAPE declaration is submitted through the ACE Secure Data Portal as a CSV file of entry numbers. Sellers who imported in their own name with their own customs bond can generally file. Sellers who relied on a supplier's delivered duty paid arrangement generally cannot.

How do I tell whether I actually paid IEEPA duties?

Review CBP Form 7501 entry summaries for shipments arriving between February 2025 and late February 2026 and look for Chapter 99 tariff classifications in the 9903.01 and 9903.02 ranges. Importers with ACE portal access can export the Entry Summary Detail Report and filter on those classifications. If your only documentation is a supplier or forwarder invoice showing a tariff surcharge, that is evidence of what you paid but not evidence of what Customs collected from you.

What is the deadline to claim an IEEPA tariff refund?

There is no single calendar deadline for the refund program, but each entry carries its own clock. A protest under 19 U.S.C. § 1514 must generally be filed within 180 days after liquidation. Entries that liquidate and pass that window without a protest move into the hardest recovery category. Waiting converts an administrative claim into a litigation claim, and eventually into no claim at all.

Are Section 301 or Section 232 tariffs refundable as well?

No. The February 2026 Supreme Court decision addressed tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Section 232 duties on steel, aluminum and other covered products, Section 301 duties on goods of Chinese origin, and antidumping and countervailing duties rest on separate statutory authority and are unaffected. Any refund analysis has to separate IEEPA duties from those other duties before a claim is filed.

Do I need to file a lawsuit at the Court of International Trade?

It depends on the liquidation status of the entries. In July 2026 the Court of International Trade entered an order directing refunds on a plaintiff's finally liquidated entries and indicated similar relief in the several thousand cases pending before it. Importers who never filed suit have no equivalent confirmed administrative route for that category, and the government has appealed the scope of that relief to the Federal Circuit. Where a meaningful share of duties sits in finally liquidated entries, a protective filing should be evaluated promptly rather than deferred.

What if I passed the tariff cost through to my customers?

That creates exposure on the other side of the ledger. Sellers who itemized a tariff surcharge at checkout or in wholesale invoices may face claims from downstream purchasers seeking recovery of amounts that have now been refunded or are refundable. Litigation of this kind has already begun against importers. Preserve records showing what was collected, what was remitted, and to whom, before deciding how to characterize a recovered refund.

Does the refund include interest?

Yes. Approved refunds are issued with statutory interest running from the original entry, consolidated by importer of record and paid electronically. Because interest accrues to the party Customs pays, the amount at stake in an importer-of-record dispute is larger than the duty figure alone, and grows the longer the underlying claim goes unresolved.

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